Church et al 2007 - Mobile search
From Inventiopedia
Church, Karen et al (2007) "Mobile Information Access: A Study of Emerging Search Behavior on the Mobile Internet" in ACM Transactions on the Web, Vol. 1, No. 1, Article 4.
Available from ACM digital library.
This article aims to study how mobile users use search services on the Mobile Internet (MI), in comparison with early web users search behaviour, as well as with mobile browsing. Given the importance of search for the web, this is an obviously important topic for study of the mobile internet. Also the perspective of comparing with early web users give an historical dimension that is interesting.
Research questions:
"(1) Is browsing still the dominant form of information access on the Mobile Internet?
(2) Are there characteristic differences between users who tend to search com- pared to users who rely solely on browsing?
(3) Is there an interaction between mobile devices and different modes of in- formation access?
(4) How do users search for information on the mobile Internet?
(5) Are their query patterns similar to those reported in Web search?
(6) Do they avail themselves of advanced search features when available?
(7) Do they tend to modify their queries? If so, how?
(8) What types of information are mobile users looking for?" (page 9)
Method:
Statistical analysis of traffic logs from one major European mobile operator (all internet traffic for 24 hours, late 2005). Analysis of urls to study search query strings.
Answers:
1. Yes. 94 percent of internet sessions involved zero searches.
2. Yes. They use the internet more (more often, longer, and download more bytes), and tend to be a little more advanced, sophisticated users.
3. To some degree. Top ten devices for both browsing and searching are generally advanced and sophisticated devices, but a little more so for search users. Interestingly, none of them have qwerty keyboards - perhaps because such devices are more expensive and rare. AND: Google is even more dominant in this market than on the normal web, with 72% of the searches. But a long tail of niche search engines for mobile content.
4. High rate of query modification indicates that it's harder to find what you're looking for. And more users seem to look at several pages of results, probably because few results are displayed at a time.
5. High degree of query overlap - limited search vocabulary. The range of content users search for is more limited than on the early web.
6. Hardly never (3%).
7. See 4.
8. Guess what? Of the top 500 query terms, more than 50% were searches for adult content.
Implications for designers:
1. Exploit query repetition to improve search precision
2. Support query modification (suggested terms etc)
3. Enrich mobile content (better keywords and phrases in mobile pages etc).
To me, it was particularly interesting to see that Google dominates absolutely over portal-specific search services, even if mobile internet use is dominated by the operator portals (according to the authors).
--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 10:36, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
See also
- A large scale study of European mobile search behaviour - a new paper from the same group with updated data from one week in 2006.
